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Torn is the Curtain: Early Film Cultures in Istanbul

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Volume 3

New Directions in Turkish Studies

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Torn is the Curtain

Early Film Cultures in Istanbul

Canan Balan

234 pages, 1 table, bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-83695-263-3 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (December 2025)

eISBN 978-1-83695-264-0 eBook Not Yet Published


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Reviews

“Th[is] book offers an original and much-needed perspective on the development of early film culture and modernity in a non-Western space, and challenges Eurocentric narratives of film history and culture.” • Ana Grgić, Babeș-Bolyai University

Description

Offering a feminist history of cinema at the edges of empire and the nation-state, this book explores how gender, class, and ethno-religious divisions were projected, performed, and entangled. It Focuses on the former Ottoman capital from the late nineteenth century to the early 1930s and investigates how cinema both reflected and shaped Istanbul’s complex social fabric. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources—including newspapers, trade records, consular reports, memoirs, novels, Islamic teachings, poems, shadow-play texts, and surviving silent films—it situates early cinematic experiences within the intersecting contexts of societal change, gender politics, and competing worldviews. The analysis reveals how religious and cultural practices, particularly the Alevi-Bektashi faith and the women’s movement, informed emerging notions of cinematic modernity and cross-cultural exchange in the region.

Canan Balan is a visiting fellow in Film at the University of Southampton, where she previously held a position as a research fellow working on post-Ottoman women in film. She has published numerous articles, book chapters, and essays on early cinema, spectatorship, early film theory, and film cultures in Istanbul and Turkey, in both English and Turkish, including articles in Film-Philosophy and Early Popular Visual Culture. She is a veteran lecturer of Istanbul Şehir University and holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of St Andrews in the UK.

Subject: Film and Television StudiesMedia StudiesHistory: 20th Century to Present
Area: Central/Eastern EuropeMiddle East & Israel


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